


Orphan Man

by Lokei



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-06
Updated: 2008-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-19 04:58:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel, when it all begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orphan Man

**Author's Note:**

> For inlovewithnight’s songfic challenge. Lyrics from "The Magician" (Jason Isbell)

_and I am an orphan man but ain't we all  
I can make myself disappear  
I am an orphan man but ain't we all  
I could be somewhere worse than here_

Daniel’s mind whirled. The door shut behind his last colleague, last peer, with something more of a snicker than a snick. Snick, snicker, snickersnee, a word for a swordblade and the action of stabbing with same, derived from the Dutch ‘steak or snye’. Appropriate, given that he’d just stabbed his career in the gullet and bled credibility all over the empty conference room.

He picked up his box of materials, evidence of painstaking, careful, scholarly research, and ducked his head as he left the building. He couldn’t see their eyes which meant they couldn’t see his—and he was used to making himself as invisible as possible.

\- - -

It occurred to Daniel as he sprawled awkwardly on the sandy ground that classic Jackson-style duck-and-cover wasn’t going to cut it with the man behind the fist this time. Military bullies were apparently made of tougher stuff than the foster-care, school-yard, grant-proposal-committee kinds.

Of course, the fact that he had thrown himself into the view of the military in order to get to go through the Stargate hadn’t been classic invisibility behavior either, so maybe he’d been asking for it.

He tensed up just a little and tried not to look like he was asking for it again.

There were a few sharp words, then, and a sudden dissipation of threat, though Daniel would be hard pressed to say exactly what the colonel—O’Neill?—had said.

He looked up, met a pair of hard brown eyes, and swallowed. For better or ill, he had the feeling that invisible was not going to be an option.

\- - -

“Dan-yel!” Skaara’s voice echoed through the cartouche room as the youth skidded around the entryway. “Dan-yel, something has come through the Stargate!”

Startled, the archaeologist—for that’s what he was still, wasn’t he? even if no one here knew the word or the why behind it—looked up from uncovering the latest set of cartouches. They were to floor level now, clearing years of sand and neglect inch by dusty inch. Sha’re claimed most of those inches came home in his robes, but at least she laughed about it, usually. A lot of who and what Daniel was and did seemed to make her laugh.

“Something?” Daniel queried. “Not someone?”

“You must see, Dan-yel, you must see!” Skaara was nearly hopping with impatience, so Daniel stood and followed, blinking against the glare even with his sunglasses as they crossed to the pyramid which housed the Stargate.

The village boys—he supposed they were young men, but Jack had called them boys and boys they would remain—were standing in a nervous circle, guns trained unflinchingly on an object on the floor.

Daniel looked, and rubbed his glasses clean, looked again, and started to laugh.

“It’s fine,” he said, crossing their worried line and picking up the Kleenex box to dust off the frost. He sneezed as some of the frost hit his nose and knew he was grinning like an idiot as Skaara and the others looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“It’s just fine,” he repeated, opening the box and blowing his nose on the first tissue to hand as their mystification increased. He pulled the rest of the tissues from the box and tucked them away into the pouch he carried below his robes, digging out the marker which he carried like a precious talisman of a life left far behind.

He scribbled a message on the side and headed for the mushroom-shaped plinth that bore the dialing coordinates. His mind was racing already, leaping from pillar to post, wondering why now, of all times, had Jack decided to test the Gate. What had changed, on Earth? Clearly, Jack wanted to know if he was alive—the box could be from no one else and for no one else. Kawalsky and Ferretti hadn’t the pull or the imagination for it. They’d probably get the joke, but it wouldn’t have occurred to them. They just didn’t see him well enough for that.

“Dan-yel?”

Daniel looked up as he punched the last symbol and the glorious wormhole boiled out into the center of the chamber.

“It’s from Colonel O’Neill,” he said. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

\- - -

There had to be something redeeming about this moment, but Daniel couldn’t see it for the life of him. Ever since a coverstone wiped out life and its certainties as he knew them, he’d fought hard to see the remaining positives of life.

He was pretty sure there wasn’t one in this situation. It had been he who had wanted to explore the area around the pyramid, he who had excavated the cartouche room, and then, like some brain-baked astrologamage, unburied the Gate as the first step to testing his theory that the Stargate might go elsewhere, might be a whole set of pathways across the night sky. He was the one that left Sha’re behind to be captured with Skaara and left the others vulnerable, injured, dead. Whatever positives there were in bad situations, Daniel knew he wasn’t usually one of them, and he wasn’t this time either. He was just a means to an end—a false answer to the question of where the attackers had come from, and now a loose end, an inconvenience, something to be shoved aside and dealt with later, when the General and the Colonel and the rest of them had time to figure out what the hell to do with a civilian who had hared off to live on an alien planet and apparently convinced an otherwise upstanding member of the Air Force to lie his patriotic ass off.

So he didn’t have much objection to where he was—scrubbed raw and left to wander the corridors in a set of military cast-offs that didn’t exactly fit him. Or maybe he didn’t fit them—too much hair, too smart, too alien, too used to the broad expanses of sky to be anything but smothered by the remembered tons of rock between himself and the sunlight. And more than that, he was just too tired and heartsore to be anything much at all—a ghost in BDU’s, leaning against a wall, invisible and unnecessary.

And then Jack was there in front of him, saying things like “food,” and “home,” and “c’mon,” and Daniel found himself looking at those dark eyes—that were somehow not as hard as they used to be—and finding something like a reflection there.

 _I am an orphan man but ain't we all  
I can't make myself reappear  
I am an orphan man but ain't we all  
I hope there's somewhere worse than here_


End file.
